I have a recent book co-authored with Robert Sterling, now available on Amazon (or go to our website http://careerstorefront.angelfire.com) entitled "What's Behind Your Belly Button?" Subtitled: "A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct". We are also exploring research for a second book at this time. I would be interested in sharing communication with anyone also studying and researching the enteric nervous system from a psychological perspective.
I am semi-retired, but am still in the practice of consulting (with a Depth Psychology and Somatics emphasis) using the Somatic Reflection Process with a small amount of clients to assist people with dealing with their feelings of isolation, anxiety, stress and health issues, and in making life-decisions that support the intelligence of the gut instincts, in healing the trauma of the body/mind split, and in supporting a positive new image of human nature. Having worked directly with Dr. Mary McCauley and Isabel Myers in the 70s with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), I have an extensive background in Typology and incorporate it into my coaching.

“What’s Behind Your Belly Button? A Psychological Perspective of the Intelligence of Human Nature and Gut Instinct” is a narrative of the maturation of the sciences (psychology and neurology) and the authors’ combined experience, all of which started to take form in the 1960’s with the unrest of youth over the Viet Nam war—the era of “give peace a chance”. -/- In the 1970’s, the authors, Martha Char Love and Robert W. Sterling, were involved in an occupational and academic counseling-teaching (...) assignment at Santa Fe Community College, dealing with the aftermath of the previous era of changes in society and integration of the Black and White cultures. Having no effective references with which to work, they used a personality inventory (MBTI), based on the work of Dr. Carl Jung. Experience with groups and individuals soon allowed feelings of the students involved to surface at a variety of levels, which were centered on personal disturbances of their pasts and were not defined by the inventory. Hours of study of what they were learning from students in counseling sessions, suggested that the authors were tapping into genuine universal instinctive feeling intelligence, primarily focused in the gut area of the body. The authors developed the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP) to focus on these gut feelings of emptiness and fullness. They found that with hundreds of people using this technique, the gut feelings were a gauge of how well the person was having his/her needs met for two universal needs: feeling acceptance (connection) and the feeling of being in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally). -/- In 1998, neurological research at Columbia University published the work of Dr. Michael Gershon that identified the enteric nervous system as a center of feeling-intelligence in the gut, which he called the “Second Brain”. The authors carefully examined this material and accepted the research findings as pointing to the same universal feeling intelligence they had experienced in counseling with hundreds of people. Utilizing the research of Dr. Gershon, the work of Dr. Lise Eliot who charts the development of children from conception through the first five years of life, a recent research study in 2005 of their own in the Psychology Department at Sonoma State University exploring the use of the SRP as a somatic depth psychology technique for self-awareness, stress-reduction, and optimal health, Love and Sterling explore the intelligence of the gut and its responses. Three main themes emerged in their study from the responses of the research participants to the follow-up interview questions. These were: increased somatic awareness; increased insights and new perspectives concerning inner needs and unresolved issues; and increased self-acceptance. They share a complete protocol and results of their clinical research findings for the SRP, including verbatim counseling sessions using this process. The results point to the importance of further research on the SRP as a valuable technique for getting in touch with the voice of the gut and learning to follow its wisdom toward a healthy life—unifying the body-mind split in the individuation process. -/- Using their vast clinical experience, the Love and Sterling have presented an interpretation of recent medical research into a new Gut Psychology. They present a more accurate behavioral understanding of the Self and human nature than has previously been available and discuss the SRP as a medical intervention, opening a much needed conversation between somatic practitioners and immunologists. They identify the elements of the basic psychological experience of a somatic depth process like the SRP as having six phases summarized in terms of their relationship to each other while taking the person in the process toward reaching wholeness and the integration of the psyche. These six phases are identified as Initializing or Opening the Doorway; Identifying; Dislodging; Dispersing or Going Back to the Source; Absorbing; and Integrating Initiation or Experiencing the Self. Each depth method may either take the person into the awareness of a new phase of the cycle or further into the one he or she is presently in when they begin the process. It is in the sixth stage and the integration of the psyche that Love and Sterling demonstrate that the immune system is boosted and the body is stabilized to a more healthy balance, which they hypothesis is capable of measurement that would show an increased T-cell count in cancer patients and a significant improvement in the health of the patient. Furthermore, they point out that he first obvious similarity of the healing process of the two systems—the physical body system and the emotional body system—of the human being is the need for the foreign substance of each system to be identified and dislodged. This process seems to require some intelligence building experiences. The physical-body immune system has memory T cells to identify the foreign or cancer cells (similar to Dislodging in phase three of somatic depth processes) and both T cells and B cells eliminate these tagged cells (similar to Dispersing in phase four of the somatic emotional processes). -/- In viewing the stages, Love and Sterling suggest that in order for the Dislodging to be used and Absorbed, the person must in phase five have a greater sensory memory of an experience before healing can begin. If we assume these correlations of structure are true in these two systems of the physical body and the emotional body, then it follows that a greater sensory memory as in phase five of the somatic emotional process would follow in the physical immune system as well. Memory T cells have their identifying ability because they are thought to have encountered antigens during a prior infection, a previous encounter with cancer, or a previous vaccination. The smarter and better trained the Memory T cell, the better the immune system is at identifying and ridding itself of foreign cancer cells. In the somatic emotional process, the thinking process about oneself actually changes and becomes more focused and intelligent about who it is and who it is not. Love and Sterling conclude that it is possible that like the T memory cell of the physical immune system, we could also identify and measure a feeling memory mechanism, possibly related to the gut feeling response, that affects our emotional immune system and actually changes one’s sense of self, our self-reflective ability and our emotional intelligence. -/- . (shrink)

For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...) issue (Love, 2007). I wondered if two articles published on the gut in one month might surely be a record, as the gut has not seemed to have so much attention in the media since Gershon’s (1998) book acclaiming it through his neurological research to have a mind of its own. -/- In the months I awaited the publication of my article, I reread Gershon’s (1998) book and it was again delightful to me to read that a scientific investigation actually uncovered evidence that the gut has a separate capacity to generate and record vital responses and functions as what he calls our second brain. Gershon outlines the biological functions of the gut as being its own intelligent brain and having its own vitality that is in communication with, but not dependent upon, the head brain. As I combed through his book and shared emails with my colleague, Robert Sterling, it became quite clear to us that Gershon’s work was supportive of the clinical findings in the work we did as guidance counselors in the 70s. Our work centered around assisting people to assess the meaning of their experiences through an awareness on the empty-full instinctual feeling responses that they identified in the gut region of the body. We found with the people that we counseled that these gut responses were linked to the dynamic struggles of balancing the two needs of the person for acceptance and for feeling in control of one’s own responses (the freedom to respond naturally), and that these two needs were instinctual and necessary to fulfill on a moment to moment basis for continued vitality of the person. Similar to Gershon’s findings, it was also our conclusion that the gut area of the body contains a feeling response center that holds a relationship to the thinking processes of the person, but is a separate response center from the thinking head responses and certainly not dependent upon it. -/- Feeling inspired by Gershon’s (1998) work and the attention recently given to the gut in the literature and media, I decided to write a second article for Somatics that further explains the specific technique of the Somatic Reflection Process (SRP). The intention of this article is to answer the questions about the process that I have been asked in the past year by many friends and colleagues who read my first article last Spring on the findings of Robert Sterling’s and my somatic work as guidance counselors. I am including both the method and a protocol for facilitating the SRP, as well as a brief summary of a recent research study using the SRP protocol presented (Love, 2005). (shrink)